Tupac Shakur narrates his own life story, stitched together entirely from interview clips he gave over the years so that the dead man appears to be speaking in the present tense. Home movies and family photographs trace him from a childhood shaped by his mother Afeni Shakur, a former Black Panther on trial for conspiracy while pregnant with him, through the Baltimore School for the Arts, into the recording booth and onto film sets. Poetry he wrote as a teenager plays alongside the finished songs it became. The film does not soften the contradictions: the same voice that recites tenderness toward his mother also details the 1994 shooting that left him wounded in a New York recording studio lobby, and the prison sentence and feuds that followed. It ends where his life did, gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996 at twenty-five, without a narrator stepping in to explain what it meant. Assembled by his mother's production company, the film's method, letting Tupac account for himself in his own recorded words, is the reason it plays differently than a standard biography.